Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  These were powerful role models, and they attracted many other women to Paris. Nina Hamnett studied there in 1914, and returned regularly: Gwen John, the reclusive, gifted sister of Augustus John (and mistress to Rodin) was achieving belated recognition in the city’s salons. Jean Rhys, who herself came to Paris to write in the early Twenties, observed that Paris seemed to be ‘full of girls’ who talked of nothing but becoming painters. For Tamara, the number of aspiring women in Paris was both an encouragement and competition – and she responded well to competition.

  By the end of 1919 she had enrolled herself in the Académie Ransom, a private school run by the widow of the Fauvist painter Paul Ransom. Passing Kizette over to the care of her mother, who was living in a pension close by, Tamara devoted most of her day to her new vocation. When classes were finished she went to the Louvre, filling the pages of her sketchbook with notes and copies of the works in its collection. At home she continued to sketch, ignoring the ache in her back and the strain in her eyes. Just as her thirteen-year-old self had worked obsessively at Adrienne’s portrait, she was now relentless in her determination to improve her draughtsmanship, smoking three packets of cigarettes a day to keep her brain alert, and then sedating herself with large doses of valerian.

  Less than a year after she entered the Académie, Tamara judged that the first stage of her education was complete. Her teachers had nothing more to show her; she could feel the confident, hard pulse of her ambition, and was ready to forge her own style. The avant-garde works that she saw displayed in Left Bank galleries were of little interest to her: the muddy earth tones used by followers of Cézanne, the abstract introspection of Kandinsky, the crazy nihilism of the Dadaists, were all equally offensive, as she later wrote, ‘I was disgusted with the banality into which art had fallen.’ Most of these artists seemed, to her frankly inept, unable even to draw; and much as she reluctantly admired Picasso’s success, she believed it was simply because his art ‘embodied the novelty of destruction’. By contrast, her own models were to be the Renaissance masters she had first discovered with Clementine: ‘I aimed at technique, métier, simplicity and good taste … colours light and bright.’7

  Yet reactionary as Tamara’s artistic instincts were, she would be drawn, magpie like, to the bolder, more dynamic aspects of modernism. She developed a colour palette of almost unnatural lacquered brilliance; the figures in her paintings had a physical force suggestive of Leger, or of Picasso’s monumental nudes. Most influential on her early work was the implosive energy and fractured shapes of cubism, whose style she principally absorbed through the work of André Lhote.

  She studied privately with the painter for several months, drawn to the way he applied cubism to decorative and modish subject matter. Lhote painted attractive people framed within fragments of a stylish bar or nightclub scene; female nudes arousingly displayed.* And if many of his peers disdained his work as ‘soft’, or ‘salon’ cubism, he provided Tamara with a model she could both copy and transcend. Portraiture was to be her principle genre, portraits of beautiful, charismatic or powerful people. And her instinct for what was chic, combined with her mastery of classical techniques, created a style that chimed deeply with contemporary commercial taste. In 1922, after less than two years of study, she had a trio of works accepted for the Salon d’Automne, one of the most widely attended showcases for new art in Paris.

  Her entries had been sponsored by friends on the selection committee: Maurice Denis, one of her teachers at the Academy, and her sister Adrienne who, impressively, was already acquiring a reputation as an architect. Even so, Tamara saw her inclusion in the Salon as a pure vindication of her talent. It was the first milestone on her journey towards money and fame, and she marked it with the promise that she would buy herself a new diamond bracelet with every two paintings that she sold, and that she would continue buying them until she had diamonds stacked from wrist to elbow.

  Tamara’s application to her new vocation initially had a positive effect on Tadeusz, who in 1920 accepted a lawyer’s position with the Banque de Commerce. The salary wasn’t large, but it restored a little of his self-esteem, and it was sufficient both to engage a housekeeper to help with Kizette and to rent a decent-sized apartment. Tamara had fallen in love with a flat that had a spacious north-facing sitting room, able to double as a painter’s studio. The fact that it was already occupied by the father of the concierge was no obstacle: the concierge was no match for her bullying, wheedling campaign and declared bluntly to Tadeusz: ‘Votre femme elle m’a eut jusque’au trognon’ (your wife sucks the marrow out of my bones).8 The father was relocated.

  The flat was on the Right Bank, but Tamara made almost daily journeys across the river to Montparnasse. This working-class area, a still-traditional mix of local grocery stores and cheap bars, was fast becoming the new artistic centre of Paris. And while she personally felt detached from many of the new trends, Tamara took care to keep abreast of them. She studied the works that were showing in the art galleries opening near the Seine and the Jardin du Luxembourg. More closely still, she studied the artists who gathered in Left Bank cafés like the Dome or the Rotonde, or in the bookshops run by Adrienne Monnier and her lover Sylvia Beach. Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres, and Beach’s Shakespeare and Company were not only the places in which the latest art books and poetry could be found, but also the latest gossip.

  Tamara knew she had to find a way into this Left Bank community. Life in St Petersburg had taught her the importance of making social contacts, of knowing how insiders dressed, talked and conducted themselves. She had already begun meeting Adrienne and her friends at Les Deux Magots; but as she made the rounds of other cafés she was often happy to sit alone, wanting simply to listen and watch.

  Some of what she saw was confusing. Among the students and artists seated around her were socialists and anarchists, parroting views that Tamara thought she had left behind in Russia. They were hideously dressed: the men in cheap suits or workers’ overalls; the women in coarsely woven smocks and headscarves. Tamara couldn’t understand why anyone would pretend to be a peasant. Her brief exposure to the Bolshevik terror had hardened her hatred of anything left wing or revolutionary. As she sat in the corner by herself, drinking her afternoon coffee, she felt that she had little point of contact with these strident young people.

  But still she liked to be among them, imagining herself as a compelling, mysterious presence, gracefully shrouded in her own cigarette smoke, apparently deep in thought. She registered the faces of those who seemed to hold most sway over a room. And she kept her antennae tuned to the other people in the cafés, fashionable men and women who were clearly tourists in this world and who might one day be patrons of her own work.

  In the early Twenties, Paris was once again a marketplace of modern culture. Before 1914 it had been the capital of the Belle Époque, home to the symbolists, decadents, post-impressionists, cubists and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Now it was the city of black jazz, Dada, and the emerging surrealists, avant-garde ballet and international poetry magazines. As the American stock market boomed and European economies regained their post-war momentum, art became a very desirable commodity. It was chic, it conferred status and it was a sound investment. Prices for a known artist like Picasso were rising – the most commercial of his paintings fetching up to a hundred thousand francs – and among foreign buyers there was already brisk competition to find the next significant talent. The entire oeuvre of a likely painter might be bought up by a single collector, and a new, avid breed of art tourists paid for guided tours of studios, or even visits to cafés and bars where fashionable painters might be spotted at play.

  The nightclub singer Bricktop recalled that in the mid-1920s this symbiosis between money and culture seemed ‘a beautiful, beautiful thing’. Paris was full of impoverished artists ‘who wanted to write, who wanted to paint and perform’; it was equally ‘full of people who had money but couldn’t make it’ and it was these ‘rich ones’ who
began ‘taking care of the … geniuses’.9 The commercial opportunities in Paris were all very interesting to Tamara, who saw nothing romantic in the idea of being poor or misunderstood. Financial success couldn’t come quickly enough for her as an artist, and there may even have been an element of calculation in the work she opted to focus on during her early career. Portraiture was a money-making genre – many of Tamara’s diamond bracelets would be bought with lucrative commissions from society figures. But certain of her canvases were particularly appealing to the 1920s art market – those that had young, contemporary and very desirable women as their subjects.

  Tamara worshipped glamour. Having always aspired to it herself, she vowed ‘to scent [it] out’ in her models, and lavished as much care on their appearance as she did on her own – the exact shade of their lipstick and eye shadow, the styling of their hair, the cut of their clothes. Their skin was particularly beautiful: Tamara had perfected a technique of tiny deliberate brush strokes that allowed her to paint surfaces of a peculiarly glossy lustre; the classical luminosity of her models’ skin would frequently be compared to Ingres.

  Naked or clothed, the subjects of her portraits also possessed a liberated sexual poise: they looked like women who were accustomed to drinking in cafés or bars, who took lovers yet cherished their independence. Tamara, by instinct as much as by choice, was making herself into the portrait painter of the new woman, the flapper, the garçonne, and everything conspired to make this a highly marketable move.

  Young women were much in the headlines. Victor Margueritte’s novel La Garçonne* had recently been published, its narrative of lesbianism, drugs and single motherhood causing such a scandal that Margueritte was stripped of his Légion d’honneur. The timing of its publication had been almost as controversial as its subject matter, since it appeared in bookshops on the same day that the French senate voted against giving women the vote.

  Members of the French Union for Women’s Suffrage protested vehemently, along with the eighty or so feminist organizations that now operated in France. Yet despite being excluded from official politics, women in France, no less than their British and American peers, were finding other ways to assert their presence: through the jobs they demanded, through the independence they claimed and, almost as significantly, through their clothes.

  In the nineteenth century America and Britain had been the principle battleground for the women’s dress reform,* but it was in Paris that the battle for emancipation joined forces with couture style. Coco Chanel, the orphaned seamstress who opened her own couture house on rue Cambon, went far beyond Poiret and his generation. She created simple shift dresses, geometric in their lines but swinging easily around a woman’s body as she walked. She appropriated the demotic uniforms of sailors and workers for a new line of bell-bottom trousers and striped jerseys; she replaced large fussy hats with berets, turbans and, by the mid-1920s, closely fitting cloches that were designed to show off their wearer’s short and shingled hair. Chanel’s rival Jean Patou predicated his own most famous styles on sportswear – the 1921 Wimbledon star Suzanne Lenglen wore his clothes both on and off the court.

  There was a liberating androgyny in these new styles – the term garçonne was precise – and just as significantly a degree of democracy. No Chanel design was cheap to buy, yet some of her garments could be reproduced with economy and speed. The inexpensive materials that she made fashionable – cottons and jerseys (the latter formerly used for men’s underwear) – were perfect for low-budget imitation. She even democratized jewellery, creating a vogue for ‘illusion’ pieces that were constructed out of paste and gilt.

  Tamara considered fashion her natural element. She had her hair cut short in 1922, so that it curved sleekly to her head, dramatizing her broad Slavic cheekbones and the brilliant blue of her eyes. Clothes were harder for her: she was still large-boned, lushly curved and too vain to force herself into straightcut shifts or trousers. Instead she played with more theatrical outfits, favouring draped white satin and feather trims for evening wear, and of course her diamond bracelets. Her interest in clothes was meticulously transferred to her canvases. In the double portrait Irene and her Sister (1925), the architectural folds of Irene’s silver-grey dress contrasted with her sister’s extravagant fall of golden hair and green coat. These elegantly dressed women, posed ambiguously against a dark forest background, were not merely a painterly construct, they looked like an illustration for a fashion magazine.

  Tamara portrayed women as she imagined they liked to view themselves, as both chic and sexually desirable. But even more distinctive was the fact that her models’ allure was directed as much, if not more, towards the gaze of other women as it was to men. Around 1920 Tamara became acquainted with one of her neighbours, a woman whom she would later casually refer to as ‘a very wealthy girl across the street, a red head who sat for many paintings’.10 Her name was Ira Perrot, and she was the model for one of Tamara’s most successful early portraits, Portrait of a Young Lady in a Blue Dress. In this 1922 work the woman’s solidly fleshed body is clearly naked beneath the cobalt blue draping of her dress, and the gaze from her kohl-darkened eyes is half accusing, half complicit. The portrait has a candid eroticism rarely seen in Tamara’s earlier work and it also had a very personal resonance, for Ira was almost certainly the woman with whom she had her first lesbian affair.

  Tamara liked sex, and when the opportunity allowed she had already begun to take lovers in Paris. Tadeusz’s shattered nerves and the claustrophobia of their early lodgings had made her nostalgic for the adulterous adventures she’d enjoyed with her Siamese consul. She trawled the cafés for attractive men and, as she later boasted, found it took very little to signal her availability. A slight, feline arching of her back and a glance slid from under her long eyelids would be followed by a drink and a few pleasantries. Tamara didn’t waste much time in making it clear that she was happy to accompany her new conquest to his hotel room or apartment.

  But it was only after she met Ira Perrot that Tamara began to appreciate the possibilities of women. Initially, she and Ira were probably just friends,* but in 1921 they went on holiday to Italy, which, for Tamara, remained one of the most passionate experiences of her life. To return to the cities she had explored with her grandmother, to enjoy the luxury of first-class hotels (at Ira’s expense) felt like a precious return to her former privileged life. In the arms of her new lover, she experienced them all with a fresh pleasure.

  It never seems to have occurred to her to react against these new feelings, to wonder if they were a momentary aberration. Even though the affair with Ira eventually waned, Tamara’s interest in women didn’t, and her work became redolent of it. Perspective, painted in 1923, was one of the most technically impressive canvases of her early career. Its portrayal of two embracing women combines a classical finish with a modernist dynamic – the women’s naked flesh looking sumptuously golden against a turquoise cloth, the line of their bodies distorted to create an exaggerated effect of mass. But it is the physical intimacy of their embrace that dominates the picture, with one of the women abstractedly stroking the inner thigh of the other as they lie together, her head thrown back in an ecstatic drowse. The scene is one of unmistakable post-coital languor, suggesting that Tamara herself could had been making love to these women before retreating to her easel to paint them. At the very least it looks as if she was painting from experience, and as critics began to identify her as a painter of ‘Amazons’* Tamara encouraged that perception by gaining the friendship and patronage of a prominent circle of sapphists.

  Women with money and influence played a significant role in the cultural life of Paris. As hostesses of their own private salons, they made it their responsibility to nurture careers, and broker contacts and connections. Three of the most powerful were Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein and the Princesse de Polignac (who before her marriage had been Winnaretta Singer, daughter of the sewing-machine magnate). All were American expatriates and lesbians, and for T
amara to gain entrée into at least one of their salons was to assure herself of valuable support.

  Her first attempt had been discouraging. A friend had taken Tamara to one of Gertrude Stein’s Saturday salons, held in Stein’s apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. Stein herself had been a disappointment – plump and plain in her brown corduroy smock, her hair unbecomingly arranged in a cottage loaf of a bun – and while Tamara could acknowledge that this odd-looking American had an impressive art collection on her walls (Stein had discovered Picasso long before most buyers) she found the style of entertainment at rue de Fleurus impossible. It was bad enough that Stein presided over conversation that was both pretentious and dry (to Tamara’s ears), but insultingly, she was allowed only a few minutes with Stein and her favoured guests before being dispatched into a corner to sit with Alice B. Toklas – Stein’s ‘wife’ – to eat cakes and drink tea. Tamara could acknowledge the excellence of Miss Toklas’s baking, but where, she wondered, was the champagne?

  Stein had made it ruthlessly clear that she rated neither Tamara nor her painting. Later, when she was more closely infiltrated into Left Bank society, Tamara realized that Stein, on the whole, was far less professionally welcoming to women than she was to men. However, when she went to Natalie Barney’s salon, Tamara encountered a completely different world, one that embraced and supported women with magnificent largesse, whether in their private affairs or in their public careers.*